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THE NURNBERG STOVE 



LOUISE DE LA RAMEE 



BOSTON, U.S.A. 

GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 
Clbe ^tl)cn0ettm preae 
1900 


79128 


Library Of Conqreaa 

Iwo CoPiES Received 

NOV 22 1900 

Copyright eatry 

Cefc *■ 

SECOND COPY 

Oehvi>r<Hl to 

OlViSlON 


2 3 1900 




Copyright, 1900 
By GINN & COMPANY 


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 


August lived in a little town called Hall. Hall 
is a favorite name for several towns in Austria 
and in Germany; but this one especial little 
Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most 
charming Old-World places that I know, and 
August, for his part, did not know any other. It 
has the green meadows and the great mountains 
all about it, and the gray-green glacier-fed water 
rushes by it. It has paved streets and enchant- 
ing little shops that have all latticed panes and 
iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old 
Gothic church, that has the noblest blendings 
of light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead 
knights, and a look of infinite strength and re- 
pose as a church should have. Then there is 


The Nurnberg Stove 


the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out 
of greenery, and looking down on a long wooden 
bridge and the broad rapid river; and- there is 
an old schloss which has been made into a guard- 
house, with battlements and frescos and heraldic 
devices in gold and colors, and a man-at-arms 
carved in stone standing life-size in his niche 
and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, 
but close at hand, is a cloister with beautiful 
marble columns and tombs, and a colossal wood- 
carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very 
rich chapel ; indeed, so full is the little town of 
the undisturbed past, that to walk in it is like 
opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all emblaz- 
oned and illuminated with saints and warriors, 
and it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, by 
reason of its monuments and its historic color, 
that I marvel much no one has ever cared to sing 
its praises. The old pious, heroic life of an age 
at once more restful and more brave than ours 
still leaves its spirit there, and then there is the 
girdle of the mountains all around, and that alone 
means strength, peace, majesty. 

In this little town a few years ago August 


3 


The Nurnberg Stove 

Strehla lived with his people in the stone-paved, 
irregular square where the grand church stands. 

He was a small boy of nine years at that time, 
— a chubby-faced little man with rosy cheeks, 
big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls the brown of 
ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was 
poor, and there were many mouths at home to 
feed. In this country the winters are long and 
very cold ; the whole land lies wrapped in snow 
for many months ; and this night that he was 
trotting home, with a jug of beer in his numb 
red hands, was terribly cold and dreary. The 
good burghers of Hall had shut their double 
shutters, and the few lamps there were flickered 
dully behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron cas- 
ings. The mountains indeed were beautiful, all 
snow-white under the stars that are so big in 
frost. Hardly any one was astir; a few good 
souls wending home from vespers, a tired post- 
boy, who blew a shrill blast from his tasseled 
horn as he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, 
and little August hugging his jug of beer to his 
ragged sheepskin coat, were all who were abroad, 
for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of 


4 


The Nurnberg Stove 


Hall go early to their beds. He could not run, 
or he would have spilled the beer; he was half 
frozen and a little frightened, but he kept up his 
courage by saying over and over again to him- 
self, “ I shall soon be at home with dear Hirsch- 
vogel.” 

He went on through the streets, past the stone 
man-at-arms of the guardhouse, and so into the 
place where the great church was, and where 
near it stood his father Karl Strehla’s house, 
with a sculptured Bethlehem over the doorway, 
and the Pilgrimage of the Three Kings painted 
on its wall. He had been sent on a long errand 
outside the gates in the afternoon, over the frozen 
fields and the broad white snow, and had been 
belated, and had thought he had heard the 
wolves behind him at every step, and had reached 
the town in a great state of terror, thankful with 
all his little panting heart to see the oil lamp 
burning under the first house shrine. But he 
had not forgotten to call for the beer, and he 
carried it carefully now, though his hands were 
so numb that he was afraid they would let the 
jug down every moment. 


5 


The Nur^iberg Stove 

The snow outlined with white every gable and 
cornice of the beautiful old wooden houses ; the 
moonlight shone on the gilded signs, the lambs, 
the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint devices 
that hung before the doors ; covered lamps 
burned before the Nativities and Crucifixions 
painted on the walls or let into the woodwork; 
here and there, where a shutter had not been 
closed, a ruddy fire-light lit up a homely interior, 
with a noisy band of children clustering round 
the house-mother and a big brown loaf, or some 
gossips spinning and listening to the cobbler’s or 
the barber’s story of a neighbor, while the oil 
wicks glimmered, and the hearth logs blazed, and 
the chestnuts sputtered in their iron roasting 
pot. Little August saw all these .things, as he 
saw everything with his two big bright eyes, that 
had such curious lights and shadows in them ; 
but he went heedfully on his way for the sake of 
the beer which a single slip of the foot would 
make him spill. At his knock and call the solid 
oak door, four centuries old if one, flew open, and 
the boy darted in with his beer and shouted with 
all the force of mirthful lungs: “ Oh, dear Hirsch- 


6 The Nurnberg Stove 

vogel, but for the thought of you I should have 
died ! ” 

It was a large barren room into which he 
rushed with so much pleasure, and the bricks 
were bare and uneven. It had a walnut-wood 
press, handsome and very old, a broad deal table, 
and several wooden stools, for all its furniture ; 
but at the top of the chamber, sending out 
warmth and color together as the lamp shed its 
rays upon it, was a tower of porcelain, burnished 
with all the hues of a king’s peacock and a 
queen’s jewels, and surmounted with armed 
figures, and shields, and flowers of heraldry, and 
a great golden crown upon the highest summit 
of all. 

It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the 
letters H. R. H., for it was in every portion the 
handwork of the great potter of Nurnberg, 
Augustin Hirschvogel, who put his mark thus, 
as all the world knows. 

The stove, no doubt, had stood in palaces and 
been made for princes, had warmed the crimson 
stockings of cardinals and the gold-broidered 
shoes of archduchesses, had glowed in presence- 


The Nur^iberg Stove 


7 


chambers and lent its carbon to help kindle sharp 
brains in anxious councils of state ; no one knew 
what it had seen or done or been fashioned for ; 
but it was a right royal thing. Yet perhaps it 
had never been more useful than it was now in 
this poor, desolate room, sending down heat and 
comfort into the troop of children tumbled to- 
gether on a wolfskin at its feet, who received 
frozen August among them with loud shouts of 
joy. 

“ Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold ! ” 
said August, kissing its gilded lion’s claws. “ Is 
father not in, Dorothea ” 

“ No, dear. He is late.” 

Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark-haired 
and serious, and with a sweet sad face, for she 
had had many cares laid on her shoulders, even 
whilst still a mere baby. She was the eldest of 
the Strehla family ; and there were ten of them 
in all. Next to her there came Jan and Karl and 
Otho, big lads, gaining a little for their own 
living; and then came August, who went up in 
the summer to the high alps with the farmers’ 
cattle, but in winter could do nothing to fill his 


8 


The Nurnbevg Stove 


own little platter and pot ; and then all the little 
ones, who could only open their mouths to be 
fed like young birds, — Albrecht and Hilda, and 
Waldo and Christof, and last of all little three- 
year-old Ermengilda, with eyes like forget-me- 
nots, whose birth had cost them the life of their 
mother. 

They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, 
half Italian, so common in the Tyrol ; some of 
the children were white and golden as lilies, 
others were brown and brilliant as fresh fallen 
chestnuts. The father was a good man, but weak 
and weary with so many to find for and so little 
to do it with. He worked at the salt furnaces, 
and by that gained a few florins ; people said he 
would have worked better and kept his family 
more easily if he had not loved his pipe and a 
draught of ale too well ; but this had only been 
said of him after his wife’s death, when trouble 
and perplexity had begun to dull a brain never 
too vigorous, and to enfeeble further a character 
already too yielding. As it was, the wolf often 
bayed at the door of the Strehla household, with- 
out a wolf from the mountains coming down. 


The Niimberg Stove 9 

Dorothea was one of those maidens who almost 
work miracles, so far can their industry and care 
and intelligence make a home sweet and whole- 
some and a single loaf seem to swell into twenty. 
The children were always clean and happy, and 
the table was seldom without its big pot of soup 
once a day. Still, very poor they were, and 
Dorothea’s heart ached with shame, for she knew 
that their father’s debts were many for flour and 
meat and clothing. Of fuel to feed the big stove 
they had always enough without cost, for their 
mother’s father was alive, and sold wood and flr 
cones and coke, and never grudged them to his 
grandchildren, though he grumbled at Strehla’s 
improvidence and hapless, dreamy ways. 

“ Father says we are never to wait for him ; 
we will have supper, now you have come home, 
dear,” said Dorothea, who, however she might 
fret her soul in secret as she knitted their hose 
and mended their shirts, never let her anxieties 
cast, a gloom on the children; only to August 
she did speak a little sometimes, because he was 
so thoughtful and so tender of her always, and 
knew as w^ell as she did that there were troubles 


lo The Number g Stove 

about money, — though these troubles were vague 
to them both, and the debtors were patient and 
kindly, being neighbors all in the old twisting 
streets between the guardhouse and the river. 

Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big 
slices of brown bread swimming in it and some 
onions bobbing up and down ; the bowl was 
soon emptied by ten wooden spoons, and then 
the three eldest boys slipped off to bed, being 
tired with their rough bodily labor in the snow 
all day, and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel 
by the stove and set it whirring, and the little 
ones got August down upon the old worn wolf- 
skin and clamored to him for a picture or a story. 
For August was the artist of the family. 

He had a piece of planed deal that his father 
had given him, and some sticks of charcoal, and 
he would draw a hundred things he had seen in 
the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when 
the children had seen enough of it, and sketching 
another in its stead, — faces and dogs’ heads, and 
men in sledges, and old women in their furs, and 
pine trees, and cocks and hens, and all sorts of 
animals, and now and then — very reverently — a 


The Number g Stove 1 1 

Madonna and Child. It was all very rough, for 
there was no one to teach him anything. But it 
was all lifelike, and kept the whole troop of 
children shrieking with laughter, or watching 
breathless, with wide open, wondering, awed eyes. 

They were all so happy ; what did they care 
for the snow outside } Their little bodies were 
warm, and their hearts merry ; even Dorothea, 
troubled about the bread for the morrow, laughed 
as she spun ; and August, with all his soul in his 
work, and little rosy Ermengilda’s cheek on his 
shoulder, glowing after his frozen afternoon, cried 
out loud, smiling, as he looked up at the stove 
that was shedding its heat down on them all : — 
“Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as 
great and good as the sun ! No ; you are greater 
and better, I think, because he goes away nobody 
knows where all these long, dark, cold hours, 
and does not care how people die for want of 
him; but you — you are always ready; just a 
little bit of wood to feed you, and you will make 
a summer for us all the winter through ! ” 

The grand old stove seemed to smile through 
all its iridescent surface at the praises of the 


12 


The Nurnberg Stove 


child. No doubt the stove, though it had known 
three centuries and more, had known but very 
little gratitude. 

It was one of those magnificent stoves in 
enameled faience which so excited the jealousy 
of the other potters of Nurnberg that in a body 
they demanded of the magistracy that Augustin 
Hirschvogel should be forbidden to make any 
more of them, — the magistracy, happily, proving 
of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with 
the wish of the artisans to cripple their greater 
fellow. 

It was of great height and breadth, with all the 
majolica luster which Hirschvogel learned to give 
to his enamels when he was making love to the 
young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married. 
There was the statue of a king at each corner, 
modeled with as much force and splendor as his 
friend Albrecht Diirer could have given unto 
them on copperplate or canvas. The body of 
the stove itself was divided into panels, which 
had the Ages of Man painted on them in poly- 
chrome ; the borders of the panels had roses and 
holly and laurel and other foliage, and German 


The Number g Stove 1 3 

mottoes in black letter of odd Old World moral- 
izing, such as the old Teutons, and the Dutch 
after them, love to have on their chimney-places 
and their drinking cups, their dishes and flagons. 
The whole was burnished with gilding in many 
parts, and was radiant everywhere with that 
brilliant coloring of which the Hirschvogel family, 
painters on glass and great in chemistry, as they 
were, were all masters. 

The stove was a very grand thing, as I say ; 
possibly Hirschvogel had made it for some mighty 
lord of the Tyrol at that time when he was an 
imperial guest at Innspruck, and fashioned so 
many things for the Schloss Amras and beautiful 
Philippine Welser, the burgher’s daughter, who 
gained an archduke’s heart by her beauty and 
the right to wear his honors by her wit. Noth- 
ing was known of the stove at this latter day in 
Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a 
master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins 
where he was building, and, finding it without 
a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it 
worth finding because it was such a good one to 
burn. That was now sixty years past, and ever 


H 


The Nurjiberg Stove 


since then the stove had stood in the big, deso^ 
late, empty room, warming three generations of 
the Strehla family, and having seen nothing 
prettier, perhaps, in all its many years than the 
children tumbled now in a cluster like gathered 
flowers at its feet. For the Strehla children, 
born to nothing else, were all born with beauty ; 
white or brown, they were equally lovely to look 
upon, and when they went into the church to 
Mass, with their curling locks and their clasped 
hands, they stood under the grim statues like 
cherubs flown down off some fresco. 

“ Tell us a story, August,” they cried in chorus, 
when they had seen charcoal pictures till they 
were tired ; and August did as he did every night 
pretty nearly — looked up at the stove and told 
them what he imagined of the many adventures 
and joys and sorrows of the human being who 
figured on the panels from his cradle to his 
grave. 

To the children the stove was a household 
god. In summer they laid a mat of fresh moss 
all round it, and dressed it up with green boughs 
and the numberless beautiful wild flowers of the 


The Nurnberg Stove 


15 


Tyrol country. In winter all their joys centered 
in it, and scampering home from school over the 
ice and snow they were happy, knowing that 
they would soon be cracking nuts or roasting 
chestnuts in the broad ardent glow of its noble 
tower, which rose eight feet high above them 
with all its spires and pinnacles and crowns. 

Once a traveling peddler had told them that 
the letters on it meant Augustin Hirschvogel, 
and that Hirschvogel had been a great German 
potter and painter, like his father before him, in 
the art-sanctified city of Nurnberg, and had made 
many such stoves, that were all miracles of beauty 
and of workmanship, putting all his heart and 
his soul and his faith into his labors, as the men 
of those earlier ages did, and thinking but little 
of gold or praise. 

An old trader, too, who sold curiosities not far 
from the church, had told August a little more 
about the brave family of Hirschvogel, whose 
houses can be seen in Nurnberg to this day ; of 
old Veit, the first of them, who painted the 
Gothic windows of St. Sebald with the marriage 
of the margravine ; of his sons and of his grand- 


1 6 The Nurnberg Stove 

sons, potters, painters, engravers all, and chief of 
them great Augustin, the Luca della Robbia of 
the North. And August’s imagination, always 
quick, had made a living personage out of these 
few records, and saw Hirschvogel as though he 
were in the flesh walking up and down the Maxi- 
milian-Strass in his visit to Innspruck, and ma- 
turing beautiful things in his brain as he stood 
on the bridge and gazed on the emerald green 
flood of the Inn. 

So the stove had got to be called Hirschvogel 
in the family, as if it were a living creature, and 
little August was very proud because he had 
been named after that famous old dead German 
who had had the genius to make so glorious a 
thing. All the children loved the stove, but 
with August the love of it was a passion ; and 
in his secret heart he used to say to himself, 
“ When I am a man, I will make just such 
things too, and then I will set Hirschvogel in a 
beautiful room in a house that I will build my- 
self in Innspruck just outside the gates, where 
the chestnuts are, by the river; that is what I 
will do when I am a man.” 


The Nurnberg Stove 


17 


For August, a salt baker’s son and a little cow- 
keeper when he was anything, was a dreamer of 
dreams, and when he was upon the high alps 
with his cattle, with the stillness and the sky 
around him, was quite certain that he would live 
for greater things than driving the herds up 
when the springtide came among the blue sea 
of gentians, or toiling down in the town with 
wood and with timber as his father and grand- 
father did every day of their lives. He was a 
strong and healthy little fellow, fed on the free 
mountain air, and he was very happy, and loved 
his family devotedly, and was as active as a 
squirrel and as playful as a hare; but he kept 
his thoughts to himself, and some of them went 
a very long way for a little boy who was only 
one among many, and to whom nobody had ever 
paid any attention except to teach him his letters 
and tell him to fear God. August in winter was 
only a little, hungry schoolboy, trotting to be 
catechised by the priest, or to bring the loaves 
from the bakehouse, or to carry his father’s 
boots to the cobbler; and in summer he was 
only one of hundreds of cowboys, who drove 


The Nurnberg Stove 


the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumbling cattle, 
ringing their throat bells, out into the sweet 
intoxication of the sudden sunlight, and lived 
up with them in the heights among the Alpine 
roses, with only the clouds and the snow summits 
near. But he was always thinking, thinking, 
thinking, for all that; and under his little sheep- 
skin winter coat and his rough hempen summer 
shirt his heart had as much courage in it as 
Hofer’s ever had, — great Hofer, who is a house- 
hold word in all the Innthal, and whom August 
always reverently remembered when he went to 
the city of Innspruck and ran out by the foam- 
ing water mill and under the wooded height of 
Berg Isel. 

August lay now in the warmth of the stove 
and told the children stories, his own little brown 
face growing red with excitement as his imagina- 
tion glowed to fever heat. That human being 
on the panels, who was drawn there as a baby in 
a cradle, as a boy playing among flowers, as a 
lover sighing under a casement, as a soldier in 
the midst of strife, as a father with children 
round him, as a weary, old, blind man on crutches, 


The Nurnberg Stove 


19 


and, lastly, as a ransomed soul raised up by 
angels, had always had the most intense interest 
for August, and he had made, not one history 
for him, but a thousand ; he seldom told them 
the same tale twice. He had never seen a story- 
book in his life ; his primer and his Mass book 
were all the volumes he had. But nature had 
given him Fancy, and she is a good fairy that 
makes up for the want of very many things ! 
only, alas ! her wings are so very soon broken, 
poor thing ! and then she is of no use at all. 

“ It is time for you all to go to bed, children,” 
said Dorothea, looking up from her spinning. 
“ Father is very late to-night ; you must not sit 
up for him.” 

“ Oh, five minutes more, dear Dorothea ! ” they 
pleaded ; and little rosy and golden Ermengilda 
climbed up into her lap. “ Hirschvogel is so 
warm, the beds are never so warm as he. Can- 
not you tell us another tale, August ? ” 

“ No,” cried August, whose face had lost its light, 
now that his story had come to an end, and who 
sat serious, with his hands clasped on his knees, 
gazing on to the luminous arabesques of the stove. 


20 The Numb erg Stove 

“ It is only a week to Christmas,” he said sud- 
denly. 

“ Grandmother’s big cakes ! ” chuckled little 
Christof, who was five years old, and thought 
Christmas meant a big cake and nothing else. 

“ What will Santa Claus find for ’Gilda if she 
be good 't ” murmured Dorothea over the child’s 
sunny head; for, however hard poverty might 
pinch, it could never pinch so tightly that Doro- 
thea would not find some wooden toy and some 
rosy apples to put in her little sister’s socks. 

“ Father Max has promised me a big goose, 
because I saved the calf’s life in June,” said 
August; it was the twentieth time he had told 
them so that month, he was so proud of it. 

“ And Aunt Mai'la will be sure to send us 
wine and honey and a barrel of flour ; she always 
does,” said Albrecht. Their Aunt Maila had a 
chalet and a little farm over on the green slopes 
towards Dorp Ampas. 

“ I shall go up into the woods and get Hirsch- 
vogel’s crown,” said August; they always crowned 
Hirschvogel for Christmas with pine boughs and 
ivy and mountain berries. The heat soon with- 


The Nurnberg Stove 


21 


ered the crown ; but it was part of the religion of 
the day to them, as much so as it was to cross 
themselves in church and raise their voices in 
the “ O Salutaris Hostia.” 

And they fell chatting of all they would do on 
the Christ-night, and one little voice piped loud 
against another’s, and they were as happy as 
though their stockings would be full of golden 
purses and jeweled toys, and the big goose in 
the soup pot seemed to them such a meal as 
kings would envy. 

In the midst of their chatter and laughter a 
blast of frozen air and a spray of driven snow 
struck like ice through the room, and reached 
them even in the warmth of the old wolfskins 
and the great stove. It was the door which had 
opened and let in the cold ; it was their father 
who had come home. 

The younger children ran joyous to meet him. 
Dorothea pushed the one wooden armchair of 
the room to the stove, and August flew to set 
the jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a 
long clay pipe ; for their father was good to them 
all, and seldom raised his voice in anger, and 


22 


The Niirnberg Stove 


they had been trained by the mother they had 
loved to dutifulness and obedience and a watch- 
ful affection. 

To-night Karl Strehla responded very wearily 
to the young ones’ welcome, and came to the 
wooden chair with a tired step and sat down 
heavily, not noticing either pipe or beer. 

“ Are you not well, dear father } ” his daughter 
asked him. 

“ I am well enough,” he answered dully, and 
sat there with his head bent, letting the lighted 
pipe grow cold. 

He was a fair, tall man, gray before his time, 
and bowed with labor. 

“ Take the children to bed,” he said suddenly, 
at last, and Dorothea obeyed. August stayed 
behind, curled before the stove ; at nine years 
old, and when one earns money in the summer 
from the farmers, one is not altogether a child 
any more, at least in one’s own estimation. 

August did not heed his father’s silence ; he 
was used to it. Karl Strehla was a man of few 
words, and, being of weakly health, was usually 
too tired at the end of the day to do more than 


23 


The Nurnberg Stove 

drink his beer and sleep. August lay on the 
wolfskin, dreamy and comfortable, looking up 
through his drooping eyelids at the golden coro- 
nets on the crest of the great stove, and wonder- 
ing for the millionth time whom it had been 
made for, and what grand places and scenes it 
had known. 

Dorothea came down from putting the little 
ones in their beds ; the cuckoo clock in the cor- 
ner struck eight ; she looked to her father and 
the untouched pipe, then sat down to her spin- 
ning, saying nothing. She thought he had been 
drinking in some tavern ; it had been often so 
with him of late. 

There was a long silence ; the cuckoo called 
the quarter twice ; August dropped to sleep, his 
curls falling over his face ; Dorothea’s wheel 
hummed like a cat. 

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on the 
table, sending the pipe on the ground. 

“ I have sold Hirschvogel,” he said ; and his 
voice was husky and ashamed in his throat. 
The spinning wheel stopped. August sprang 
erect out of his sleep. 


^4 


The Numberg Stove 


“ Sold Hirschvogel ! ” If their father had 
dashed the holy crucifix on the floor at their feet 
and spat on it, they could not have shuddered 
under the horror of a greater blasphemy. 

“ I have sold Hirschvogel ! ” said Karl Strehla 
in the same husky, dogged voice. “ I have sold 
it to a traveling trader in such things for two 
hundred florins. What would you — I owe 
double that. He saw it this morning when you 
were all out. He will pack it and , take it to 
Munich to-morrow.” 

Dorothea gave a low, shrill cry : — 

“ Oh, father ! — the children — in midwinter ! ” 
She turned white as the snow without ; her 
words died away in her throat. 

August stood, half blind with sleep, staring 
with dazed eyes as his cattle stared at the 
sun when they came out from their winter’s 
prison. 

“ It is not true ! It is not true ! ” he muttered. 
“You are jesting, father } ” 

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh. 

“ It is true. Would you like to know what is 
true too ? — that the bread you eat, and the meat 


The Nilrnberg Stove 


25 


you put in this pot, and the roof you have over 
your heads, are none of them paid for, have been 
none of them paid for for months and months ; 
if it had not been for your grandfather, I should 
have been in prison all summer and autumn ; and 
he is out of patience and will do no more now. 
There is no work to be had ; the masters go to 
younger men ; they say I work ill ; it may be so. 
Who can keep his head above water with ten hun- 
gry children dragging him down } When your 
mother lived it was different. Boy, you stare at 
me as if I were a mad dog ! You have made a 
god of yon china thing. Well — it goes; goes 
to-morrow. Two hundred florins, that is some- 
thing. It will keep me out of prison for a little, 
and with the spring things may turn — ” 

August stood like a creature paralyzed. His 
eyes were wide open, fastened on his father’s 
with terror and incredulous horror; his face had 
grown as white as his sister’s ; his chest heaved 
with tearless sobs. 

“ It is not true ! It is not true ! ” he echoed 
stupidly. It seemed to him that the very skies 
must fall, and the earth perish, if they could take 


26 


The Niimberg Stove 


away Hirschvogel. They might as soon talk of 
tearing down God’s sun out of the heavens. 

“You will find it true,” said his father dog- 
gedly, and angered because he was in his own 
soul bitterly ashamed to have bartered away the 
heirloom and treasure of his race and the comfort 
and health-giver of his young children. “You 
will find it true. The dealer has paid me half 
the money to-night, and will pay me the other 
half to-morrow, when he packs it up and takes it 
away to Munich. No doubt it is worth a great 
deal more, — at least I suppose so, as he gives 
that, — but beggars cannot be choosers. The little 
black stove in the kitchen will warm you all just as 
well. Who would keep a gilded, painted thing in 
a poor house like this, when one can make two 
hundred florins by it } Dorothea, you never sobbed 
more when your mother died. What is it, when 
all is said ? — a bit of hardware much too grand- 
looking for such a room as this. If all the Strehlas 
had not been born fools, it would have been sold 
a century ago, when it was dug up out of the 
ground. ‘ It is a stove for a museum,’ the trader 
said when he saw it. To a museum let it go.” 


The Number g Stove 27 

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare’s when 
it is caught for its death, and threw himself on 
his knees at his father’s feet. 

“ Oh, father, father ! ” he cried convulsively, 
his hands closing on Strehla’s knees, and his 
uplifted face blanched and distorted with terror. 
“ Oh, father, dear father, you cannot mean what 
you say.f^ Send away — our life, our sun, our 
joy, our comfort.^ We shall all die in the dark 
and the cold. Sell me rather. Sell me to any 
trade or any pain you like ; I will not mind. 
But Hirschvogel ! — it is like selling the very 
cross off the altar! You must be in jest. You 
could not do such a thing — you could not! — 
you who have always been gentle and good, and 
who have sat in the warmth here year after year 
with our mother. It is not a piece of hardware, 
as you say ; it is a living thing, for a great man’s 
thoughts and fancies have put life into it, and it 
loves us though we are only poor little children, 
and we love it with all our hearts and souls, and 
up in heaven I am sure the dead Hirschvogel 
knows ! Oh, listen ; I will go and try and get 
work to-morrow ! I will ask them to let me cut 


28 


The Nurnberg Stove 


ice or make the paths through the snow. There 
must be something I could do, and I will beg 
the people we owe money to to wait ; they are 
all neighbors, they will be patient. But sell 
Hirschvogel ! — oh, never ! never ! never ! Give 
the florins back to the vile man. Tell him it 
would be like selling the shroud out of mother’s 
coffin, or the golden curls off Ermengilda’s head ! 
Oh, father, dear father ! do hear me, for pity’s 
sake ! ” 

Strehla was moved by the boy’s anguish. He 
loved his children, though he was often weary of 
them, and their pain was pain to him. But 
besides emotion, and stronger than emotion, was 
the anger that August roused in him ; he hated 
and despised himself for the barter of the heir- 
loom of his race, and every word of the child 
stung him with a stinging sense of shame. 

And he spoke in his wrath rather than in his 
sorrow. 

“ You are a little fool,” he said harshly, as they 
had never heard him speak. “You rave like a 
play-actor. Get up and go to bed. The stove 
is sold. There is no more to be said. Children 


The Nurnberg Stove 


29 


like you have nothing to do with such matters. 
The stove is sold, and goes to Munich to-morrow. 
What is it to you ? Be thankful I can get bread 
for you. Get on your legs I say, and go to bed.’' 

Strehla took up the jug of ale as he paused, 
and drained it slowly as a man who had no cares. 

August sprang to his feet and threw his hair 
back off his face ; the blood rushed into his 
, cheeks, making them scarlet; his great soft eyes 
flamed alight with furious passion. 

“You dare not!” he cried aloud, “you dare 
not sell it, I say! It is not yours alone; it is 
ours — ” 

Strehla flung the emptied jug on the bricks 
with a force that shivered it to atoms, and, rising 
to his feet, struck his son a blow that felled him 
to the floor. It was the first time in all his life 
that he had ever raised his hand against any one 
of his children. 

Then he took the oil lamp that stood at his 
elbow and stumbled off to his own chamber with 
a cloud before his eyes. 

“What has happened.'^” said August a little 
while later, as he opened his eyes and saw Doro- 


30 The Nurnberg Stove 

thea weeping above him on the wolfskin before 
the stove. He had been struck backward, and 
his head had fallen on the hard bricks where the 
wolfskin did not reach. He sat up a moment, 
with his face bent upon his hands. 

“ I remember now,” he said, very low, under 
his breath. 

Dorothea showered kisses on him, while her 
tears fell like rain. 

“ But, oh, dear, how could you speak so 
to father ? ” she murmured. “ It was very 
wrong.” 

“No, I was right,” said August; and his little 
mouth, that hitherto had only curled in laughter, 
curved downward with a fixed and bitter serious- 
ness. “ How dare he ? How dare he ? ” he mut- 
tered, with his head sunk in his hands. “ It is 
not his alone. It belongs to us all. It is as 
much yours and mine as it is his.” 

Dorothea could only sob in answer. She was 
too frightened to speak. The authority of their 
parents in the house had never in her remem- 
brance been questioned. 

“ Are you hurt by the fall, dear August ? ” she 


The Number g Stove 3 1 

murmured at length, for he looked to her so pale 
and strange. 

“Yes — no. I do not know. What does it 
matter ” 

He sat up upon the wolfskin with passionate 
pain upon his face ; all his soul was in rebellion, 
and he was only a child and was powerless. 

“ It is' a sin ; it is a theft ; it is an infamy,” he 
said slowly, his eyes fastened on the gilded feet 
of Hirschvogel. 

“ Oh, August, do not say such things of father ! ” 
sobbed his sister. “ Whatever he does, we ought 
to think it right.” 

August laughed aloud. 

“ Is it right that he should spend his money in 
drink } — that he should let orders lie unexecuted 1 
— that he should do his work so ill that no one 
cares to employ him } — that he should live on 
grandfather’s charity, and then dare sell a thing 
that is ours every whit as much as it is his } 
To sell Hirschvogel! Oh, dear God! I would 
sooner sell my soul ! ” 

“ August ! ” cried Dorothea with piteous en- 
treaty. He terrified her; she could not recog- 


32 


The Nurnberg Stove 


nize her little, gay, gentle brother in those fierce 
and blasphemous words. 

August laughed aloud again ; then all at once 
his laughter broke down into bitterest weeping. 
He threw himself forward on the stove, covering 
it with kisses, and sobbing as though his heart 
would burst from his bosom. 

What could he do.^ Nothing, nothing, noth- 
ing ! 

“ August, dear August,” whispered Dorothea 
piteously, and trembling all over, — for she was 
a very gentle girl, and fierce feeling terrified her, 
— “ August, do not lie there. Come to bed ; it 
is quite late. In the morning you will be calmer. 
It is horrible indeed, and we shall die of cold, at 
least the little ones ; but if it be father’s will — ” 

“ Let me alone,” said August through his teeth, 
striving to still the storm of sobs that shook him 
from head to foot. “ Let me alone. In the 
morning! — how can you speak of the morn- 
ing ? ” 

“ Come to bed, dear,” sighed his sister. “ Oh, 
August, do not lie and look like that! you 
frighten me. Do come to bed.” 


The Number g Stove 


33 


“ I shall stay here.” 

“ Here ! all night ! ” 

“ They might take it in the night. Besides, 
to leave it now ! ” 

“ But it is cold ! the fire is out.” 

“ It will never be warm any more, nor shall 
we. 

All his childhood had gone out of him, all his 
gleeful, careless, sunny temper had gone with it ; 
he spoke sullenly and wearily, choking down the 
great sobs in his chest. To him it was as if the 
end of the world had come. 

His sister lingered by him while striving to 
persuade him to go to his place in the little 
crowded bedchamber with Albrecht and Waldo 
and Christof. But it was in vain. “ I shall stay 
here,” was all he answered her. And he stayed 
— all the night long. 

The lamps went out; the rats came and ran 
across the floor ; as the hours crept on through 
midnight and past, the cold intensified and the 
air of the room grew like ice. August did not 
move ; he lay with his face downward on the 
golden and rainbow-hued pedestal of the house- 


34 


The Nurnberg Stove 


hold treasure, which henceforth was to be cold 
forevermore, an exiled thing in a foreign city, 
in a far-off land. 

Whilst yet it was dark his three elder brothers 
came down the stairs and let themselves out, 
each bearing his lantern and going to his work 
in stone yard and timber yard and at the salt 
works. They did not notice him ; they did not 
know what had happened. 

A little later his sister came down with a light 
in her hand to make ready the house ere morn- 
ing should break. 

She stole up to him and laid her hand on his 
shoulder timidly. 

“ Dear August, you must be frozen. August, 
do look up ! do speak ! ” 

August raised his eyes with a wild, feverish, sul- 
len look in them that she had never seen there. 
His face was ashen white ; his lips were like fire. 
He had not slept all night ; but his passionate 
sobs had given way to delirious waking dreams 
and numb senseless trances, which had alternated 
one on another all through the freezing, lonely, 
horrible hours. 


The Nilrnberg Stove 35 

“ It will never be warm again,” he muttered, 
“ never again ! ” 

Dorothea clasped him with trembling hands. 

“ August ! do you not know me } ” she cried 
in an agony. “ I am Dorothea. Wake up, dear 
— wake up ! It is morning, only so dark ! ” 

August shuddered all over. 

“ The morning! ” he echoed. 

He slowly rose up on to his feet. 

“ I will go to grandfather,” he said very 
low. “ He is always good ; perhaps he could 
save it.” 

Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker of 
the house-door drowned his words. A strangle 
voice called aloud through the keyhole: — 

“ Let me in 1 Quick I — there is no time to 
lose ! More snow like this, and the roads will 
all be blocked. Let me in I Do you hear ? I 
am come to take the great stove.” 

August sprang erect, his fists doubled, his 
eyes blazing. 

“You shall never touch it!” he screamed; 
“ you shall never touch it ! ” 

“ Who shall prevent us ? ” laughed a big man 


36 


The Nur7tberg Stove 


who was a Bavarian, amused at the fierce little 
figure fronting him. 

“ I ! ” said August. “ You shall never have it ! 
you shall kill me first ! ” 

“ Strehla,” said the big man as August’s father 
entered the room, “ you have got a little mad dog 
here ; muzzle him.” 

One way and another they did muzzle him. 
He fought like a little demon, and hit out right 
and left, and one of his blows gave the Bavarian 
a black eye. But he was soon mastered by four 
grown men, and his father flung him with no 
light hand out from the door of the back en- 
trance, and the buyers of the stately and beautiful 
stove set to work to pack it heedfully and carry 
it away. 

When Dorothea stole out to look for August, 
he was nowhere in sight. She went back to 
little ’Gilda, who was ailing, and sobbed over the 
child, whilst the others stood looking on, dimly 
understanding that with Hirschvogel was going 
all the warmth of their bodies, all the light of 
their hearth. 

Even their father now was sorry and ashamed ; 


The Nurnberg Stove 37 ^ 

but two hundred florins seemed a big sum to 
him, and, after all, he thought the children could 
warm themselves quite as well at the black iron 
stove in the kitchen. Besides, whether he re- 
gretted it now or not, the work of the Nurnberg 
potter was sold irrevocably, and he had to stand 
still and see the men from Munich wrap it in 
manifold wrappings and bear it out into the snowy 
air to where an ox cart stood in waiting for it. 

In another moment Hirschvogel was gone — 
gone forever and aye. 

August had stood still for a time, leaning, sick 
and faint from the violence that had been used 
to him, against the back wall of the house. The 
wall looked on a court where a well was, and 
the backs of other houses, and beyond them the 
spire of the Muntze Tower and the peaks of the 
mountains. 

Into the court an old neighbor hobbled for 
water, and, seeing the boy, said to him: — 

“ Child, is it true your father is selling the big 
painted stove 1 ” 

August nodded his head, then burst into a 
passion of tears. 


38 


The Nurnberg Stove 


“ Well, for sure he is a fool,” said the neighbor. 
“ Heaven forgive me for calling him so before his 
own child ! but the stove was worth a mint of 
money. I do remember in my young days, in 
old Anton’s time (that was your great-grand- 
father, my lad), a stranger from Vienna saw it, 
and said that it was worth its weight in gold.” 

August’s sobs went on their broken, impetuous 
course. 

“ I loved it! I loved it!” he moaned. “ I do 
not care what its value was. I loved it ! / loved 

it!" 

“You little simpleton!” said the old man, 
kindly. “ But you are wiser than your father, 
when all’s said. If sell it he must, he should 
have taken it to good Herr Steiner over at 
Spriiz, who would have given him honest value. 
But no doubt they took him over his beer — ay, 
ay! but if I were you I would do better than 
cry. I would go after it.” 

August raised his head, the tears raining down 
his cheeks. 

“ Go after it when you are bigger,” said the 
neighbor, with a good-natured wish to cheer him 


The Nilrnberg Stove 


59 


up a little. “ The world is a small thing after 
all : I was a traveling clockmaker once upon a 
time, and I know that your stove will be safe 
enough whoever gets it; anything that can be 
sold for a round sum is always wrapped up in 
cotton wool by everybody. Ay, ay, don’t cry so 
much ; you will see your stove again some day.” 

Then the old man hobbled away to draw his 
brazen pail full of water at the well. 

August remained leaning against the wall; his 
head was buzzing, and his heart fluttering with 
the new idea which had presented itself to his 
mind. “ Go after it,” had said the old man. He 
thought, “ Why not go with it t ” He loved it 
better than any one, even better than Dorothea ; 
and he shrank from the thought of meeting his 
father again, his father who had sold Hirschvogel. 

He was by this time in that state of exaltation 
in which the impossible looks quite natural and 
commonplace. His tears were still wet on his 
pale cheeks, but they had ceased to fall. He ran 
out of the courtyard by a little gate, and across 
to the huge Gothic porch of the church. From 
there he could watch unseen his father’s house 


40 


The Nilrnberg Stove 


door, at which were always hanging some blue- 
and-gray pitchers, such as are common and so 
picturesque in Austria, for a part of the house 
was let to a man who dealt in pottery. 

He hid himself in the grand portico, which he 
had so often passed through to go to mass or 
complin within, and presently his heart gave a 
great leap, for he saw the straw-enwrapped stove 
brought out and laid with infinite care on the 
bullock dray. Two of the Bavarian men mounted 
beside it, and the sleigh-wagon slowly crept over 
the snow of the place — snow crisp and hard as 
stone. The noble old minster looked its grand- 
est and most solemn, with its dark gray stone 
and its vast archways, and its porch that was 
itself as big as many a church, and its strange 
gargoyles and lamp-irons black against the snow 
on its roof and on the pavement; but for once 
August had no eyes for it : he only watched for 
his old friend. Then he, a little unnoticeable 
figure enough, like a score of other boys in Hall, 
crept, unseen by any of his brothers or sisters, 
out of the porch and over the shelving uneven 
square, and followed in the wake of the dray. 


The Nurnberg Stove 


41 


Its course lay towards the station of the rail- 
way, which is close to the salt works, whose 
smoke at times sullies this part of clean little 
Hall, though it does not do very much damage. 
From Hall the iron road runs northward through 
glorious country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, 
Buda, and southward over the Brenner into Italy. 
Was Hirschvogel going north or south This 
at least he would soon know. 

August had often hung about the little station, 
watching the trains come and go and dive into 
the heart of the hills and vanish. No one said 
anything to him for idling about ; people are 
kind-hearted and easy of temper in this pleasant 
land, and children and dogs are both happy 
there. He heard the Bavarians arguing and 
vociferating a great deal, and learned that they 
meant to go too and wanted to go with the great 
' stove itself. But this they could not do, for 
neither could the stove go by a passenger train 
nor they themselves go in a goods train. So at 
length they insured their precious burden for a 
large sum, and consented to send it by a lug- 
gage train which was to pass through Hall in 


42 


The Numb erg Stove 


half an hour. The swift trains seldom deign to 
notice the existence of Hall at all. 

August heard, and a desperate resolve made 
itself up in his little mind. Where Hirschvogel 
went would he go. He gave one terrible 
thought to Dorothea — poor, gentle Dorothea! 
— sitting in the cold at home, then set to work 
to execute his project. How he managed it he 
never knew very clearly himself; but certain it is 
that when the goods train from the north, that 
had come all the way from Linz on the Danube, 
moved out of Hall, August was hidden behind 
the stove in the great covered truck, and wedged, 
unseen and undreamt of by any human creature, 
amidst the cases of wood-carving, of clocks and 
clock-work, of Vienna toys, of Turkish carpets, 
of Russian skins, of Hungarian wines, which 
shared the same abode as did his swathed and 
bound Hirschvogel. No doubt he was very 
naughty, but it never occurred to him that he 
was so : his whole mind and soul were absorbed 
in the one entrancing idea, to follow his beloved 
friend and fire-king. 

It was very dark in the closed truck, which 


The Nurnberg Stove 


43 


had only a little window above the door ; and it 
was crowded, and had a strong smell in it from 
the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. 
But August was not frightened ; he was close to 
Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be closer 
still; for he meant to do nothing less than get 
inside Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd little 
boy, and having had, by great luck, two silver 
groschen in his breeches pocket, which he had 
earned the day before by chopping wood, he had 
bought some bread and sausage at the station 
of a woman there who knew him, and who 
thought he was going out to his Uncle Joachim s 
chalet above Jenbach. This he had with him, 
and this he ate in the darkness and the lumber- 
ing, pounding, thundering noise which made 
him giddy, as never had he been in a train of 
any kind before. Still he ate, having had no 
breakfast, and being a child, and half a German, 
and not knowing at all how or when he ever 
would eat again. 

When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, 
but as much as he thought was prudent (for who 
could say when he would be able to buy anything 


44 


The Nilrnberg Stove 


more?), he set to work like a little mouse to 
make a hole in the withes of straw and hay which 
enveloped the stove. If it had been put in a 
packing-case, he would have been defeated at the 
onset. As it was, he gnawed, and nibbled, and 
pulled, and pushed, just as a mouse would have 
done, making his hole where he guessed that the 
opening of the stove was — the opening through 
which he had so often thrust the big oak logs to 
feed it. No one disturbed him ; the heavy train 
went lumbering on and on, and he saw nothing 
at all of the beautiful mountains, and shining 
waters, and great forests through which he was 
being carried. He was hard at work getting 
through the straw and hay and twisted ropes; 
and get through them at last he did, and found 
the door of the stove, which he knew so well, and 
' which was quite large enough for a child of his 
age to slip through, and it was this which he had 
counted upon doing.' Slip through he did, as he 
had often done at home for fun, and curled him- 
self up there to see if he could anyhow remain 
during many hours. He found that he could; 
air came in through the brass fretwork of the 


The Numb erg Stove 


45 


stove; and with admirable caution in such a 
little fellow he leaned out, drew the hay and straw 
together, and rearranged the ropes, so that no 
one could ever have dreamed a little mouse had 
been at them. Then he curled himself up again, 
this time more like a dormouse than anything 
else ; and, being safe inside his dear Hirschvogel 
and intensely cold, he went fast asleep, as if he 
were in his own bed at home with Albrecht and 
Christof on either side of him. The train lum- 
bered on, stopping often and long, as the habit 
of goods trains is, sweeping the snow away with 
its cow-switcher, and rumbling through the deep 
heart of the mountains, with its lamps aglow like 
the eyes of a dog in a night of frost. 

The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, 
and the child slept soundly for a long while. 
When he did awake, it was quite dark outside in 
the land ; he could not see, and of course he was 
in absolute darkness; and for a while he was 
sorely frightened, and trembled terribly, and 
sobbed in a quiet, heartbroken fashion, thinking 
of them all at home. Poor Dorothea ! how anx- 
ious she would be! How she would run over 


46 


The Nurnberg Stove 


the town and walk up to grandfather’s at Dorf 
Ampas, and perhaps even send over to Jenbach, 
thinking he had taken refuge with Uncle Joa- 
chim! His conscience smote him for the sor- 
row he must be even then causing to his gentle 
sister; but it never occurred to him to try and 
go back. If he once were to lose sight of 
Hirschvogel, how could he ever hope to find it 
again ? how could he ever know whither it had 
gone — north, south, east, or west } The old 
neighbor had said that the world was small ; but 
August knew at least that it must have a great 
many places in it : that he had seen himself on 
the maps on his schoolhouse walls. Almost any 
other little boy would, I think, have been fright- 
ened out of his wits at the position in which he 
found himself; but August was brave, and he 
had a firm belief that God and Hirschvogel 
would take care of him. The master-potter of 
Nurnberg was always present to his mind, a 
kindly, benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling 
manifestly in that porcelain tower whereof he 
had been the maker. 

A droll fancy, you say } But every child with 


The Nurnberg Stove 47 

a soul in him has quite as quaint fancies as this 
one was of August’s. 

So he got over his terror and his sobbing 
both, though he was so utterly in the dark. 
He did not feel cramped at all, because the 
stove was so large, and air he had in plenty, as 
it came through the fretwork running round the 
top. He was hungry again, and again nibbled 
with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He 
could not at all tell the hour. Every time the 
train stopped and he heard the banging, stamp- 
ing, shouting, and jangling of chains that went 
on, his heart seemed to jump up into his mouth. 
If they should find him out ! Sometimes porters 
came and took away this case and the other, a 
sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, now a 
dead chamois. Every time the men trampled 
near him, and swore at each other, and banged 
this and that to and fro, he was so frightened 
that his very breath seemed to stop. When 
they came to lift the stove out, would they find 
him.f^ and if they did find him, would they kill 
him.^^ That was what he kept thinking of all 
the way, all through the dark hours, which 


48 


The Numb erg Stove 


seemed without end. The goods trains are usu- 
ally very slow, and are many days doing what a 
quick train does in a few hours. This one was 
quicker than most, because it was bearing goods 
to the King of Bavaria; still, it took all the 
short winter’s day and the long winter’s night 
and half another day to go over ground that the 
mail trains cover in a forenoon. It passed great 
armored Kufstein standing across the beautiful 
and solemn gorge, denying the right of way to 
all the foes of Austria. It passed twelve hours 
later, after lying by in out-of-the-way stations, 
pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border of 
Bavaria. And here the Nurnberg stove, with 
August inside it, was lifted out heedfully and 
set under a covered way. When it was lifted 
out, the boy had hard work to keep in his 
screams ; he was tossed to and fro as the men 
lifted the huge thing, and the earthenware walls 
of his beloved fire-king were not cushions of 
down. However, though they swore and grum- 
bled at the weight of it, they never suspected 
that a living child was inside it, and they carried 
it out on to the platform and set it down under 


The Number g Stove 


49 


the roof of the goods shed. There it passed 
the rest of the night and all the next morning, 
and August was all the while within it. 

The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over 
Rosenheim, and all the vast Bavarian plain was 
one white sheet of snow. If there had not 
been whole armies of men at work always clear- 
ing the iron rails of the snow, no trains could 
ever have run at all. Happily for August, the 
thick wrappings in which the stove was envel- 
oped and the stoutness of its own make screened 
him from the cold, of which, else, he must have 
died — frozen. He had still some of his loaf, 
and a little — a very little — of his sausage. 
What he did begin to suffer from was thirst; 
and this frightened him almost more than any- 
thing else, for Dorothea had read aloud to them 
one night a story of the tortures some wrecked 
men had endured because they could not find 
any water but the salt sea. It was many hours 
since he had last taken a drink from the wooden 
spout of their old pump, which brought them 
the sparkling, ice-cold water of the hills. 

But, fortunately for him, the stove, having 


50 


The Nurnberg Stove 


been marked and registered as “ fragile and 
valuable,” was not treated quite like a mere bale 
of goods, and the Rosenheim station-master, who 
knew its consignees, resolved to send it on by 
a passenger train that would leave there at day- 
break. And when this train went out, in it, 
among piles of luggage belonging to other trav- 
elers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, Salzburg, 
was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up 
like a mole in the winter under the grass. 
Those words, “ fragile and valuable,” had made 
the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. 
He had begun to get used to his prison, and a 
little used to the incessant pounding and jum- 
bling and rattling and shaking with which 
modern travel is always accompanied, though 
modern invention does deem itself so mightily 
clever. All in the dark he was, and he was 
terribly thirsty ; but he kept feeling the earthen- 
ware sides of the Nurnberg giant and saying, 
softly, “ Take care of me ; oh, take care of me, 
dear Hirschvogel ! ” 

He did not say, “Take me back”; for, now 
that he was fairly out in the world, he wished to 


The Nurnberg Stove 


51 


see a little of it. He began to think that they 
must have been all over the world in all this 
time that the rolling and roaring and hissing 
and jangling had been about his ears ; shut up 
in the dark, he began to remember all the tales 
that had been told in Yule round the fire at 
his grandfather’s good house at Dorf, of gnomes 
and elves and subterranean terrors, and the Erl 
King riding on the black horse of night, and 
— and — and he began to sob and to tremble 
again, and this time did scream outright. But 
the steam was screaming itself so loudly that 
no one, had there been any one nigh, would 
have heard him ; and in another minute or so 
the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and 
he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, 
“ Mlinchen ! Miinchen ! ” 

Then he knew enough of geography to know 
that he was in the heart of Bavaria. He had 
had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by 
the Bavarian forest guards, when in the excite- 
ment of hunting a black bear he had overpassed 
the limits of the Tyrol frontier. 

That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young 


52 


The Nurnberg Stove 


chamois hunter who had taught him to handle 
a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very name 
of Bavaria a terror to August. 

“ It is Bavaria ! It is Bavaria ! ” he sobbed to 
the stove ; but the stove said nothing to him ; it 
had no fire in it. A stove can no more speak 
without fire than a man can see without light. 
Give it fire, and it will sing to you, tell tales to 
you, offer you in return all the sympathy you 
ask. 

“It is Bavaria!'’ sobbed August; for it is 
always a name of dread augury to the Tyro- 
leans, by reason of those bitter struggles and 
midnight shots and untimely deaths which come 
from those meetings of jager and hunter in the 
Bayerischenwald. But the train stopped ; Mu- 
nich was reached, and August, hot and cold by 
turns, and shaking like a little aspen leaf, felt 
himself once more carried out on the shoulders 
of men, rolled along on a truck, and finally set 
down, where he knew not, only he knew he was 
thirsty — so thirsty! If only he could have 
reached his hand out and scooped up a little 
snow ! 


The Nurnberg Stove 


53 


He thought he had been moved on this truck 
many miles, but in truth the stove had been 
only taken from the railway station to a shop 
in the Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was 
always set upright on its four gilded feet, an 
injunction to that effect having been affixed to 
its written label, and on its gilded feet it stood 
now in the small dark curiosity shop of one 
Hans Rhilfer. 

“ I shall not unpack it till Anton comes,” he 
heard a man’s voice say ; and then he heard a 
key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken stillness 
that ensued he concluded he was alone, and 
ventured to peep through the straw and hay. 
What he saw was a small square room filled with 
pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs, 
old steel armor, shields, daggers, Chinese idols, 
Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all the art 
lumber and fabricated rubbish of a bric-a-brac 
dealer’s. It seemed a wonderful place to him; 
but, oh ! was there one drop of water in it all } 
That was his single thought ; for his tongue was 
parching, and his throat felt on fire, and his 
chest began to be dry and choked as with dust. 


54 


The Nurnberg Stove 


There was not a drop of water, but there was a 
lattice window grated, and beyond the window 
was a wide stone ledge covered with snow. 
August cast one look at the locked door, darted 
out of his hiding-place, ran and opened the win- 
dow, crammed the snow into his mouth again 
and again, and then flew back into the stove, 
drew the hay and straw over the place he 
entered by, tied the cords, and shut the brass 
door down on himself. He had brought some 
big icicles in with him, and by them his thirst 
was finally, if only temporarily, quenched. Then 
he sat still in the bottom of the stove, listening 
intently, wide awake, and once more recovering 
his natural boldness. 

The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his 
heart and his conscience with a hard squeeze 
now and then ; but he thought to himself, “ If 
I can take her back Hirschvogel, then how 
pleased she will be, and how little ’Gilda will 
clap her hands ! ” He was not at all selfish in 
his love for Hirschvogel : he wanted it for them 
all at home quite as much as for himself. There 
was at the bottom of his mind a kind of ache 


The Nurnberg Stove 


55 


of shame that his father — his own father — 
should have stripped their hearth and sold their 
honor thus. 

A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin 
sculptured on a house eave near. August had 
felt for the crumbs of his loaf in his pocket, and 
had thrown them to the little bird sitting so 
easily on the frozen snow. 

In the darkness where he was he now heard 
a little song, made faint by the stove-wall and 
the window glass that was between him and it, 
but still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was 
the robin, singing after feeding on the crumbs. 
August, as he heard, burst into tears. He 
thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw 
out some grain or some bread on the snow 
before the church. “ What use is it going 
there',' she said, “ if we forget the sweetest 
creatures God has made ? " Poor Dorothea ! 
Poor, good, tender, much-burdened little soul! 
He thought of her till his tears ran like 
rain. 

Yet it never once occurred to him to dream 
of going home. Hirschvogel was here. 


56 


The Nurjiberg Stove 


Presently the key turned in the lock of the 
door, he heard heavy footsteps and the voice of 
the man who had said to his father, “You have 
a little mad dog; muzzle him ! ” The voice said, 
“ Ay, ay, you have called me a fool many times. 
Now you shall see what I have gotten for two 
hundred dirty florins. Potztause^id ! never did 
you do such a stroke of work.” 

Then the other voice grumbled and swore, 
and the steps of the two men approached more 
closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a-pat, 
pit-a-pat, as a mouse’s does when it is on the 
top of a cheese and hears a housemaid’s broom 
sweeping near. They began to strip the stove 
of its wrappings : that he’ could tell by the noise 
they made with the hay and the straw. Soon 
they had stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew 
by the oaths and exclamations of wonder and 
surprise and rapture which broke from the man 
who had not seen it before. 

“ A right royal thing ! A wonderful and never- 
to-be-rivaled thing ! Grander than the great 
stove of Hohen-Salzburg ! Sublime! magnifi- 
cent 1 matchless I ” 


The Nurnberg Stove 


57 


So the epithets ran on in thick guttural voices, 
diffusing a smell of lager beer so strong as they 
spoke that it reached August crouching in his 
stronghold. If they should open the door of the 
stove ! That was his frantic fear. If they should 
open it, it would be all over with him. They 
would drag him out ; most likely they would kill 
him, he thought, as his mother’s young brother 
had been killed in the Wald. 

The perspiration rolled off his forehead in his 
agony ; but he had control enough over himself 
to keep quiet, and after standing by the Nurnberg 
master’s work for nigh an hour, praising, mar- 
veling, expatiating in the lengthy German tongue, 
the men moved to a little distance and began talk- 
ing of sums of money and divided profits, of which 
discourse he could make out no meaning. All he 
could make out was that the name of the king — 
the king — the king came over very often in their 
arguments. He fancied at times they quarreled, 
for they swore lustily and their voices rose hoarse 
and high ; but after a while they seemed to pacify 
each other and agree to something, and were in 
great glee, and so in these merry spirits came and 


58 


The Nurnberg Stove 


slapped the luminous sides of stately Hirschvogel, 
and shouted to it : — 

“ Old Mumchance, you have brought us rare 
good luck! To think you were smoking in a 
silly fool of a salt baker’s kitchen all these years 1 ” 

Then inside the stove August jumped up, with 
flaming cheeks and clinching hands, and was 
almost on the point of shouting out to them that 
they were the thieves and should say no evil of his 
father, when he remembered, just in time, that to 
breathe a word or make a sound was to bring 
ruin on himself and sever him forever from 
Hirschvogel. So he kept quite still, and the men 
barred the shutters of the little lattice and went 
out by the door, double-locking it after them. 
He had made out from their talk that they were 
going to show Hirschvogel to some great person: 
therefore he kept quite still and dared not move. 

Muffled sounds came to him through the 
shutters from the streets below — the rolling of 
wheels, the clanging of church bells, and bursts 
of that military music which is so seldom silent 
in the streets of Munich. An hour perhaps 
passed by; sounds of steps on the stairs kept 


The Nurnberg Stove 


59 


him in perpetual apprehension. In the intensity 
of his anxiety, he forgot that he was hungry and 
many miles away from cheerful, Old World little 
Hall, lying by the clear gray river-water, with the 
ramparts of the mountains all around. 

Presently the door opened again sharply. He 
could hear the two dealers’ voices murmuring 
unctuous words, in which “ honor,” “ gratitude,” 
and many fine long noble titles played the chief 
parts. The voice of another person, more clear 
and refined than theirs, answered them curtly, 
and then, close by the Nurnberg stove and the 
boy’s ear, ejaculated a single Wunderschbn T'' 
August almost lost his terror for himself in his 
thrill of pride at his beloved Hirschvogel being 
thus admired in the great city. He thought the 
master-potter must be glad too. 

“ Wunderschon ! ” ejaculated the stranger a 
second time, and then examined the stove in all 
its parts, read all its mottoes, gazed long on all 
its devices. 

“ It must have been made for the Emperor 
Maximilian,” he said at last ; and the poor little 
boy, meanwhile, within, was “ hugged up into 


6o 


The Niimberg Stove 


nothing,” as you children say, dreading that every 
moment he would open the stove. And open it 
truly he did, and examined the brass-work of the 
door ; but inside it was so dark that crouching 
August passed unnoticed, screwed up into a ball 
like a hedgehog as he was. The gentleman shut to 
the door at length, without having seen anything 
strange inside it; and then he talked long and 
low with the tradesmen, and, as his accent was 
different from that which August was used to, 
the child could distinguish little that he said, 
except the name of the king and the word 
“ gulden ” again and again. After a while he 
went away, one of the dealers accompanying him, 
one of them lingering behind to bar up the 
shutters. Then this one also withdrew again, 
double-locking the door. 

The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself and 
dared to breathe aloud. 

What time was it ? 

Late in the day, he thought, for to accompany 
the stranger they had lighted a lamp; he had 
heard the scratch of the match, and through the 
brass fretwork had seen the lines of light. 


The Number g Stove 6i 

He would have to pass the night here, that 
was certain. He and Hirschvogel were locked 
in, but at least they were together. If only he 
could have had something to eat ! He thought 
with a pang of how at this hour at home they ate 
the sweet soup, sometimes with apples in it from 
Aunt Maila’s farm orchard, and sang together, 
and listened to Dorothea’s reading of little tales, 
and basked in the glow and delight that had 
beamed on them from the great Nlirnberg fire- 
king. 

“ Oh, poor, poor little ’Gilda ! What is she do- 
ing without the dear Hirschvogel ” he thought. 
Poor little ’Gilda ! she had only now the black 
iron stove of the ugly little kitchen. Oh, how 
cruel of father! 

August could not bear to hear the dealers 
blame or laugh at his father, but he did feel that 
it had been so, so cruel to sell Hirschvogel. The 
mere memory of all those long winter evenings, 
when they had all closed round it, and roasted 
chestnuts or crab apples in it, and listened to the 
howling of the wind and the deep sound of the 
church bells, and tried very much to make each 


62 


The Nurnberg Stove 


other believe that the wolves still came down 
from the mountains into the streets of Hall, and 
were that very minute growling at the house door 
— all this memory coming on him with the sound 
of the city bells, and the knowledge that night 
drew near upon him so completely, being added 
to his hunger and his fear, so overcame him that 
he burst out crying for the fiftieth time since he 
had been inside the stove, and felt that he would 
starve to death, and wondered dreamily if Hirsch- 
vogel would care. Yes, he was sure Hirschvogel 
would care. Had he not decked it all summer 
long with alpine roses and edelweiss and heaths 
and made it sweet with thyme and honeysuckle 
and great garden lilies Had he ever forgotten 
when Santa Claus came to make it its crown of 
holly and ivy and wreathe it all around } 

“ Oh, shelter me ; save me ; take care of me ! ” 
he prayed to the old fire-king, and forgot, poor 
little man, that he had come on this wild-goose 
chase northward to save and take care of Hirsch- 
vogel ! 

After a time he dropped asleep, as children 
can do when they weep, and little robust hill-born 


The Nurnberg Stove 


63 


boys most surely do, be they where they may. 
It was not very cold in this lumber-room ; it was 
tightly shut up, and very full of things, and at 
the back of it were the hot pipes of an adjacent 
house, where a great deal of fuel was burnt. 
Moreover, August’s clothes were warm ones, and 
his blood was young. So he was not cold, though 
Munich is terribly cold in the nights of Decem- 
ber; and he slept on and on — which was a com- 
fort to him, for he forgot his woes, and his perils, 
and his hunger, for a time. 

Midnight was once more chiming from all the 
brazen tongues of the city when he awoke, and, 
all being still around him, ventured to put his 
head out of the brass door of the stove to see 
why such a strange bright light was round him. 

It was a very strange and brilliant light in- 
deed ; and yet, what is perhaps still stranger, it 
did not frighten or amaze him, nor did what he 
saw alarm him either, and yet I think it would 
have done you .or me. For what he saw was 
nothing less than all the bric-a-brac in motion. 

A big jug, an Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen, was 
solemnly dancing a minuet with a plump Faenza 


64 


The Nurnberg Stove 


jar; a tall Dutch clock was going through a 
gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient chair; a 
very droll porcelain figure of Littenhausen was 
bowing to a very stiff soldier in terre cuite of 
Ulm; an old violin of Cremona was playing 
itself, and a queer little shrill plaintive music 
that thought itself merry came from a painted 
spinnet covered with faded roses ; some gilt 
Spanish leather had got up on the wall and 
laughed ; a Dresden mirror was tripping about, 
crowned with flowers, and a Japanese bonze was 
riding along on a griffin; a slim Venetian rapier 
had come to blows with a stout Ferrara sabre, 
all about a little pale-faced chit of a damsel in 
white Nymphenburg china; and a portly Fran- 
conian pitcher in gres gris was calling aloud, 
“ Oh, these Italians ! always at feud ! ” But no- 
body listened to him at all. A great number of 
little Dresden cups and saucers were all skip- 
ping and waltzing ; the teapots, with their broad 
round faces, were spinning their own lids like 
teetotums; the high-backed gilded chairs were 
having a game of cards together; and a little 
Saxe poodle, with a blue ribbon at its throat. 


The Nurnberg Stove 


65 


was running from one to another, whilst a yellow 
cat of Cornells Lachtleven’s rode about on a 
Delft horse in blue pottery of 1489. Meanwhile 
the brilliant light shed on the scene came from 
three silver candelabra, though they had no can- 
dles set up in them; and, what is the greatest 
miracle of all, August looked on at these mad 
freaks and felt no sensation of wonder! He 
only, as he heard the violin and the spinnet 
playing, felt an irresistible desire to dance too. 

No doubt his face said what he wished; for a 
lovely little lady, all in pink and gold and white, 
with powdered hair, and high-heeled shoes, and 
all made of the very finest and fairest Meissen 
china, tripped up to him, and smiled, and gave 
him her hand, and led him out to a minuet. 
And he danced it perfectly — poor little August 
, in his thick, clumsy shoes, and his thick, clumsy 
sheepskin jacket, and his rough homespun linen, 
and his broad Tyrolean hat I He must have 
danced it perfectly, this dance of kings and 
queens in days when crowns were duly honored, 
for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and 
never scolded him at all, and danced so divinely 


66 


The Nurnberg Stove 


herself to the stately measures the spinnet was 
playing that August could not take his eyes off 
her till, their minuet ended, she sat down on her 
own white-and-gold bracket. 

“ I am the Princess of Saxe-Royale,” she said 
to him, with a benignant smile; “and you have 
got through that minuet very fairly.” 

Then he ventured to say to her : — 

“ Madame my princess, could you tell me 
kindly why some of the figures and furniture 
dance and speak, and some lie up in a corner 
like lumber.^ It does make me curious. Is it 
rude to ask ” 

For it greatly puzzled him why, when some of 
the bric-a-brac was all full of life and motion, some 
was quite still and had not a single thrill in it. 

“ My dear child,” said the powdered lady, “ is 
it possible that you do not know the reason } 
Why, those silent, dull things are imitation ! ” 

This ®she said with so much decision that she 
evidently considered it a condensed but complete 
answer. 

“ Imitation } ” repeated August, timidly, not 
understanding. 


The Numberg Stove 


67 


“ Of course ! Lies, falsehoods, fabrications ! ” 
said the princess in pink shoes, very vivaciously. 
“ They only pretend to be what we are ! They 
never wake up: how can they.^ No imitation 
ever had any soul in it yet.” 

“ Oh ! ” said August, humbly, not even sure 
that he understood entirely yet. He looked at 
Hirschvogel : surely it had a royal soul within 
it : would it not wake up and speak Oh, dear ! 
how he longed to hear the voice of his fire-king I 
And he began to forget that he stood by a lady 
who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white china, 
with the year 1746 cut on it, and the Meissen 
mark. 

“ What will you be when you are a man } ” 
said the little lady, sharply, for her black eyes 
were quick though her red lips were smiling. 
“Will you work for the Kdnigliche Porcellan- 
Manufacture like my great dead Kandler ” 

“ I have never thought,” said August, stam- 
mering ; “ at least — that is — I do wish — I do 
hope to be a painter, as was Master Augustin 
Hirschvogel at Niirnberg.” ^ 

“ Bravo ! ” said all the real bric-a-brac in one 


68 


The Nurnberg Stove 


breath, and the two Italian rapiers left off fight- 
ing to cry, “ Benone ! ” For there is not a bit 
of true bric-a-brac in all Europe that does not 
know the names of the mighty masters. 

August felt quite pleased to have won so 
much applause, and grew as red as the lady’s 
shoes with bashful contentment. 

“ I knew all the Hirschvogels, from old Veit 
downwards,” said a fat gres de Flandre beer jug; 
“ I myself was made at Nurnberg.” And he 
bowed to the great stove very politely, taking off 
his own silver hat — I mean lid — with a courtly 
sweep that he could scarcely have learned from 
burgomasters. The stove, however, was silent, 
and a sickening suspicion (for what is such heart- 
break as a suspicion of what we love ? ) came 
through the mind of August : Was Hirschvogel 
only imitation ? 

“No, no, no, no!” he said to himself stoutly; 
though Hirschvogel never stirred, never spoke, 
yet would he keep all faith in it I After all their 
happy years together, after all the nights of 
warmth and joy he owed it, should he doubt his 
own friend and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet he 


The Nilrnberg Stove 


69 


had kissed in his babyhood ? “ No, no, no, no ! ” 

he said again, with so much emphasis that the 
Lady of Meissen looked sharply again at him. 

“ No,” she said, with pretty disdain ; “ no, 
believe me, they may ‘ pretend ’ forever. They 
can never look like us ! They imitate even our 
marks, but never can they look like the real 
thing, never can they chassent de race'' 

“ How should they } " said a bronze statuette 
of Vischer’s. “ They daub themselves green 
with verdigris, or sit out in the rain to- get 
rusted; but green and rust are not patina; only 
the ages can give that ! ” 

“ And my imitations are all in primary colors, 
staring colors, hot as the colors of a hostelry's 
signboard ! ” said the Lady of Meissen, with a 
shiver. 

“ Well, there is a gres de Flandre over there, 
who pretends to be a Hans Kraut, as I am,” 
said the jug with the silver hat, pointing with 
his handle to a jug that lay prone on its side in 
a corner. “He has copied me as exactly as it 
is given to moderns to copy us. Almost he 
might be mistaken for me. But yet what a dif- 


70 


The Nurnberg Stove 


ference there is I How crude are his blues ! 
how evidently done over the glaze are his black 
letters ! He has tried to give himself my very 
twist; but what a lamentable exaggeration of 
that playful deviation in my lines which in his 
becomes actual deformity ! ” 

“ And look at that,” said the gilt Cordovan 
leather, with a contemptuous glance at a broad 
piece of gilded leather spread out on a table. 
“ They will sell him cheek by jowl with me, and 
give him my name ; but look ! / am overlaid 

with pure gold beaten thin as a film and laid 
on me in absolute honesty by worthy Diego de 
las Gorgias, worker in leather of lovely Cordova 
in the blessed reign of Ferdinand the Most 
Christian. His gilding is one part gold to 
eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and it 
has been laid on him with a brush — a brush / 
— pah ! of course he will be as black as a crock 
in a few years’ time, whilst I am as bright as 
when I first was made, and, unless I am burnt 
as my Cordova burnt its heretics, I shall shine 
on forever.” 

“ They carve pear wood because it is so soft. 


The Niimberg Stove 71 

and dye it brown, and call it me ! ” said an old 
oak cabinet, with a chuckle. 

“ That is not so painful ; it does not vulgarize 
you so much as the cups they paint to-day and 
christen after me T' said a Carl Theodor cup 
subdued in hue, yet gorgeous as a jewel. 

“ Nothing can be so annoying as to see com- 
mon gimcracks aping me!'' interposed the prin- 
cess in the pink shoes. 

“ They even steal my motto, though it is 
Scripture,” said a Trauerkrug of Regensburg in 
black-and-white. 

“ And my own dots they put on plain English 
china creatures ! ” sighed the little white maid 
of Nymphenburg. 

“ And they sell hundreds and thousands of 
common china plates, calling them after me, and 
baking my saints and my legends in a muffle of 
to-day ; it is blasphemy ! ” said a stout plate of 
Gubbio, which in its year of birth had seen the 
face of Maestro Giorgio. 

“ That is what is so terrible in these bric-a- 
brac places,” said the princess of Meissen. “ It 
brings one in contact with such low, imitative 


72 


The Nurnberg Stove 


creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays 
unless un’der glass at the Louvre or South 
Kensington.” 

“ And they get even there,” sighed the gres 
de Flandre. “ A terrible thing happened to a 
dear friend of mine, a terre cuite of Blasius (you 
know the terres cuites of Blasius date from 
1560). Well, he was put under glass in a mu- 
seum that shall be nameless, and he found him- 
self set next to his own imitation born and 
baked yesterday at Frankfort, and what think 
you the miserable creature said to him, with a 
grin 1 ‘ Old Pipeclay,’ — that is what he called 

my friend, — ‘the fellow that bought me got just 
as much commission on me as the fellow that 
bought you, and that was all that he thought 
about. You know it is only the public money 
that goes ! ’ And the horrid creature grinned 
again till he actually cracked himself. There is 
a Providence above all things, even museums.” 

“ Providence might have interfered before, and 
saved the public money,” said the little Meissen 
lady with the pink shoes. 

“After all, does it matter.?” said a Dutch jar 


The Numb erg Stove 73 

of Haarlem. “ All the shamming in the world 
will not make them us ! ” 

“ One does not like to be vulgarized,” said 
the Lady of Meissen, angrily. 

“ My maker, the Krabbetje,* did not trouble 
his head about that,” said the Haarlem jar, 
proudly. “ The Krabbetje made me for the 
kitchen, the bright, clean, snow-white Dutch 
kitchen, well-nigh three centuries ago, and now 
I am thought worthy the palace ; yet I wish I 
were at home ; yes, I wish I could see the good 
Dutch vrouw, and the shining canals, and the 
great green meadows dotted with the kine.” 

“ Ah ! if we could all go back to our makers ! ” 
sighed the Gubbio plate, thinking of Giorgio 
Andreoli and the glad and gracious days of the 
Renaissance: and somehow the words touched 
the frolicsome souls of the dancing jars, the 
spinning teapots, the chairs that were playing 
cards; and the violin stopped its merry music 
with a sob, and the spinnet sighed, thinking 
of dead hands. 


* Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born i6io, 
master-potter of Delft and Haarlem. 


74 


The Nurnberg Stove 


Even the little Saxe poodle howled for a 
master forever lost; and only the swords went 
on quarreling, and made such a clattering noise 
that the Japanese bonze rode at them on his 
monster and knocked them both right over, 
and they lay straight and still, looking foolish, 
and the little Nymphenburg maid, though she 
was crying, smiled and almost laughed. 

Then from where the great stove stood there 
came a solemn voice. 

All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and the 
heart of its little human comrade gave a great 
jump of joy. 

“ My friends,” said that clear voice from the 
turret of Nurnberg faience, “ I have listened to 
all you have said. There is too much talking 
among the Mortalities whom one of themselves 
has called the Windbags. Let not us be like 
them. I hear among men so much vain speech, 
so much precious breath and precious time 
wasted in empty boasts, foolish anger, useless 
reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble mouthings, 
that I have learned to deem speech a curse, laid 
on man to weaken and envenom all his under- 


The Nurnberg Stove 


75 


takings. For over two hundred years I have 
never spoken myself: you, I hear, are not so 
reticent. I only speak now because one of you 
said a beautiful thing that touched me. If we 
all might but go back to our makers ! Ah, 
yes ! if we might ! We were made in days 
when even men were true creatures, and so we, 
the work of their hands, were true too. We, 
the begotten of ancient days, derive all the 
value in us from the fact that our makers 
wrought at us with zeal, with piety, with integ- 
rity, with faith, — not to win fortunes or to glut 
a market, but to do nobly an honest thing and 
create for the honor of the Arts and God. I 
see amidst you a little human thing who loves 
me, and in his own ignorant childish way loves 
Art. Now, I want him forever to remember 
this night and these words ; to remember that 
we are what we are, and precious in the eyes 
of the world, because centuries ago those who 
were of single mind and of pure hand so created 
us, scorning sham and haste and counterfeit. 
Well do I recollect my master, Augustin Hirsch- 
vogel. He led a wise and blameless life, and 


76 


The Nurnberg Stove 


wrought in loyalty and love, and made his time 
beautiful thereby, like one of his own rich, 
many-colored church casements, that told holy 
tales as the sun streamed through them. Ah, 
yes, my friends, to go back to our masters ! — 
that would be the best that could befall us. 
But they are gone, and even the perishable 
labors of their lives outlive them. For many, 
many years I, once honored of emperors, dwelt 
in a humble house and warmed in successive 
winters three generations of little, cold, hungry 
children. When I warmed them they forgot 
that they were hungry; they laughed and told 
tales, and slept at last about my feet. Then I 
knew that humble as had become my lot it 
was one that my master would have wished 
for me, and I was content. Sometimes a tired 
woman would creep up to me, and smile be- 
cause she was near me, and point out my golden 
crown or my ruddy fruit to a baby in her arms. 
That was better than to stand in a great hall 
of a great city, cold and empty, even though 
wise men came to gaze and throngs of fools 
gaped, passing with flattering words. Where I 


77 


The Nur7iberg Stove 

^go now I know not; but since I go from that 
humble house where they loved me, I shall be 
sad and alone. They pass so soon — those 
fleeting mortal lives ! Only we endure — we, 
the things that the human brain creates. We 
can but bless them a little as they glide by: if 
we have done that, we have done what our mas- 
ters wished. So in us our masters, being dead, 
yet may speak and live.” 

Then the voice sank away in silence, and a 
strange golden light that had shone on the 
great stove faded away; so also the light died 
down in the silver candelabra. A soft, pathetic 
melody stole gently through the room. It came 
from the old, old spinnet that was covered with 
the faded roses. 

Then that sad, sighing music of a bygone day 
died too ; the clocks of the city struck six of the 
morning; day was rising over the Bayerischen- 
wald. August awoke with a great start, and 
found himself lying on the bare bricks of the 
floor of the chamber, and all the bric-a-brac was 
lying quite still all around. The pretty Lady 
of Meissen was motionless on her porcelain 


yS The Nurnberg Stove 

bracket, and the little Saxe poodle was quiet at. 
her side. 

He rose slowly to his feet. He was very cold, 
but he was not sensible of it or of the hunger 
that was gnawing his little empty entrails. He 
was absorbed in the wondrous sight, in the won- 
drous sounds, that he had seen and heard. 

All was dark around him. Was it still mid- 
night or had morning come Morning, surely; 
for against the barred shutters he heard the tiny 
song of the robin. 

Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step up the 
stair. He had but a moment in which to scram- 
ble back into the interior of the great stove, 
when the door opened and the two dealers en- 
tered, bringing burning candles with them to see 
their way. 

August was scarcely conscious of danger more 
than he was of cold or hunger. A marvelous 
sense of courage, of security, of happiness, was 
about him, like strong and gentle arms enfolding 
him and lifting him upwards — upwards — up- 
wards ! Hirschvogel would defend him. 

The dealers undid the shutters, scaring the 


The Nilrnberg Stove 


79 


redbreast away, and then tramped about in their 
heavy boots and chattered in contented voices, 
and began to wrap up the stove once more in all 
its straw and hay and cordage. 

It never once occurred to them to glance inside. 
Why should they look inside a stove that they 
had bought and were about to sell again for all 
its glorious beauty of exterior } 

The child still did not feel afraid. A great 
exaltation had come to him : he was like one 
lifted up by his angels. 

Presently the two traders called up their por- 
ters, and the stove, heedfully swathed and 
wrapped and tended as though it were some sick 
prince going on a journey, was borne on the 
shoulders of six stout Bavarians down the stairs 
and out of the door into the Marienplatz. Even 
behind all those wrappings August felt the icy 
bite of the intense cold of the outer air at dawn 
of a winter’s day in Munich. The men moved 
the stove with exceeding gentleness and care, so 
that he had often been far more roughly shaken 
in his big brothers’ arms than he was in his 
journey now ; and though both hunger and thirst 


8o 


The Nurnberg Stove 


made themselves felt, being foes that will take no 
denial, he was still in that state of nervous exalta- 
tion which deadens all physical suffering and is 
at once a cordial and an opiate. He had heard 
Hirschvogel speak; that was enough. 

The stout carriers tramped through the city, 
six of them, with the Nurnberg fire-castle on 
their brawny shoulders, and went right across 
Munich to the railway station, and August in the 
dark recognized all the ugly, jangling, pounding, 
roaring, hissing railway noises, and thought, 
despite his courage and excitement, “ Will it be 
a very long journey.^” for his stomach had at 
times an odd sinking sensation, and his head 
sadly often felt light and swimming. If it was a 
very, very long journey, he felt half afraid that he 
would be dead or something bad before the end, 
and Hirschvogel would be so lonely : that was 
what he thought most about; not much about 
himself, and not much about Dorothea and the 
house at home. He was “ high strung to high 
emprise,” and could not look behind him. 

Whether for a long or a short journey, whether 
for weal or woe, the stove with August still 


The Number g Stove Si 

within it was once more hoisted up into a great 
van ; but this time it was not all alone, and the 
two dealers as well as the six porters were all 
with it. 

He in his darkness knew that ; for he heard 
their voices. The train glided away over the 
Bavarian plain southward ; and he heard the 
men say something of Berg and the Wurm-See, 
but their German was strange to him, and he 
could not make out what these names meant. 

The train rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, 
and roar of steam, and stench of oil and burning 
coal. It had to go quietly and slowly on account 
of the snow which was falling, and which had 
fallen all night. 

“ He might have waited till he came to the 
city,” grumbled one man to another. “ What 
weather to stay on at Berg ! ” 

But who he was that stayed on at Berg, 
August could not make out at all. 

Though the men grumbled about the state of 
the roads and the season, they were hilarious and 
well content, for they laughed often, and, when 
they swore, did so good-humoredly, and promised 


82 


The Nurnberg Stove 


their porters fine presents at New Year; and 
August, like a shrewd little boy as he was, who 
even in the secluded Innthal had learned that 
money is the chief mover of men’s mirth, thought 
to himself with a terrible pang: — 

“ They have sold Hirschvogel for some great 
sum ! They have sold him already ! ” 

Then his heart grew faint and sick within him, 
for he knew very well that he must soon die, shut 
up without food and water thus ; and what new 
owner of the great fire-palace would ever permit 
him to dwell in it ? 

“ Never mind ; I will die,” thought he ; “ and 
Hirschvogel will know it.” 

Perhaps you think him a very foolish little 
fellow; but I do not. 

It is always good to be loyal and ready to 
endure to the end. 

It is but an hour and a quarter that the train 
usually takes to pass from Munich to the Wurm- 
See or Lake of Starnberg; but this morning the 
journey was much slower, because the way was 
encumbered by snow. When it did reach Pos- 
senhofen and stop, and the Nurnberg stove was 


The Number g Stove 83 

lifted out once more, August could see through 
the fretwork of the brass door, as the stove stood 
upright facing the lake, that this Wurm-See was 
a calm and noble piece of water, of great width, 
with low wooded banks and distant mountains, a 
peaceful, serene place, full of rest. 

It was now near ten o’clock. The sun had 
come forth ; there was a clear gray sky here- 
abouts ; the snow was not falling, though it lay 
white and smooth everywhere, down to the edge 
of the water, which before long would itself be 
ice. 

Before he had time to get more than a glimpse 
of the green gliding surface, the stove was again 
lifted up and placed on a large boat that was in 
waiting — one of those very long and huge 
boats which the women in these parts use as 
laundries, and the men as timber rafts. The 
stove, with much labor and much expenditure of 
time and care, was hoisted into this, and August 
would have grown sick and giddy with the heav- 
ing and falling if his big brothers had not long 
used him to such tossing about, so that he was 
as much at ease head, as feet, downward. The 


84 


The Nurnberg Stove 


stove once in it safely with its guardians, the big 
boat moved across the lake to Leoni. How a 
little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got that Tuscan- 
sounding name I cannot tell ; but Leoni it is. 
The big boat was a long time crossing ; the lake 
here is about three miles broad, and these heavy 
barges are unwieldy and heavy to move, even 
though they are towed and tugged at from the 
shore. 

“ If we should be too late ! ” the two dealers 
muttered to each other, in agitation and alarm. 
“ He said eleven o’clock.” 

“ Who was he } ” thought August ; “ the buyer, 
of course, of Hirschvogel.” The slow passage 
across the Wurm-See was accomplished at length; 
the lake was placid ; there was a sweet calm in 
the air and on the water ; there was a great deal 
of snow in the sky, though the sun was shining 
and gave a solemn hush to the atmosphere. 
Boats and one little steamer were going up 
and down; in the clear frosty light the distant 
mountains of Zillerthal and the Algau Alps were 
visible ; market people, cloaked and furred, went 
by on the water or on the banks ; the deep woods 


The Niimberg Stove 


85 


of the shores were black and gray and brown. 
Poor August could see nothing of a scene that 
would have delighted him ; as the stove was now 
set, he could only see the old worm-eaten wood 
of the huge barge. 

Presently they touched the pier at Leoni. 

“ Now, men, for a stout mile and half! You 
shall drink your reward at Christmas-time,” said 
one of the dealers to his porters, who, stout, 
strong men as they were, showed a disposition 
to grumble at their task. Encouraged by large 
promises, they shouldered sullenly the Niirnberg 
stove, grumbling again at its preposterous weight, 
but little dreaming that they carried within it a 
small, panting, trembling boy ; for August began 
to tremble now that he was about to see the future 
owner of Hirschvogel. 

“ If he look a good, kind man,” he thought, “ I 
will beg him to let me stay with it.” 

The porters began their toilsome journey, and 
moved off from the village pier. He could see 
nothing, for the brass door was over his head, 
and all that gleamed through it was the clear 
gray sky. He had been tilted on to his back, 


86 


The Nurnberg Stove 


and if he had not been a little mountaineer, used 
to hanging head downwards over crevasses, and, 
moreover, seasoned to rough treatment by the 
hunters and guides of the hills and the salt- 
workers in the town, he would have been made 
ill and sick by the bruising and shaking and 
many changes of position to which he had been 
subjected. 

The way the men took was a mile and a half 
in length, but the road was heavy with snow, and 
the burden they bore was heavier still. The 
dealers cheered them on, swore at them and 
praised them in one breath ; besought them and 
reiterated their splendid promises, for a clock 
was striking eleven, and they had been ordered 
to reach their destination at that hour, and, 
though the air was so cold, the heat-drops rolled 
off their foreheads . as they walked, they were so 
frightened at being late. But the porters would 
not budge a foot quicker than they chose, and as 
they were not poor fourfooted carriers their em- 
ployers dared not thrash them, though most will- 
ingly would they have done so. 

The road seemed terribly long to the anxious 


The Number g Stove 


87 


tradesmen, to the plodding porters, to the poor 
little man inside the stove, as he kept sinking and* 
rising, sinking and rising, with each of their steps. 

Where they were going he had no idea, only 
after a very long time he lost the sense of the 
fresh icy wind blowing on his face through the 
brasswork above, and felt by their movements 
beneath him that they were mounting steps or 
stairs. Then he heard a great many different 
voices, but he could not understand what was be- 
ing said. He felt that his bearers paused some 
time, then moved on and on again. Their feet 
went so softly he thought they must be moving 
on carpet, and as he felt a warm air come to him 
he concluded that he was in some heated cham- 
bers, for he was a clever little fellow, and could 
put two and two together, though he was so hun- 
gry and so thirsty and his empty stomach felt so 
strangely. They must have gone, he thought, 
through some very great number of rooms, for 
they walked so long on and on, on and on. At 
last the stove was set down again, and, happily 
for him, set so that his feet were downward. 

What he fancied was that he was in some 


S8 The Numb erg Stove 

museum, like that which he had seen in the city 
of Innspruck. 

The voices he heard were very hushed, and the 
steps seemed to go away, far away, leaving him 
alone with Hirschvogel. He dared not look out, 
but he peeped through the brasswork, and all he 
could see was a big carved lion’s head in ivory, 
with a gold crown atop. It belonged to a velvet 
fauteuil, but he could not see the chair, only the 
ivory lion. 

There was a delicious fragrance in the air — 
a fragrance as of flowers. “ Only how can it be 
flowers? ” thought August. “ It is November! ” 

From afar off, as it seemed, there came a 
dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet as the spinnet’s 
had been, but so much fuller, so much richer, 
seeming as though a chorus of angels were sing- 
ing all together. August ceased to think of the 
museum : he thought of heaven. “ Are we gone 
to the Master ? ” he thought, remembering the 
words of Hirschvogel. 

All was so still around him ; there was no 
sound anywhere except the sound of the far-off 
choral music. 


LofC. 


The Numb erg Stove 


89 


He did not know it, but he was in the royal 
castle of Berg, and the music he heard was the 
music of 'Wagner, who was playing in a distant 
room some of the motives of “ Parsival.” 

Presently he heard a fresh step near him, and 
he heard a low voice say, close behind him. 
So ! ” An exclamation no doubt, he thought, of 
admiration and wonder at the beauty of Hirsch- 
vogel. 

Then the same voice said, after a long pause, 
during which no doubt, as August thought, this 
newcomer was examining all the details of the 
wondrous fire-tower, “ It was well bought; it is 
exceedingly beautiful ! It is most undoubtedly 
the work of Augustin Hirschvogel.” 

Then the hand of the speaker turned the round 
handle of the brass door, and the fainting soul 
of the poor little prisoner within grew sick with 
fear. 

The handle turned, the door was slowly drawn 
open, some one bent down and looked in, and the 
same voice that he had heard in praise of its 
beauty called aloud, in surprise : “ What is this in 
it } A live child ! ” 


90 


The Niimberg Stove 


Then August, terrified beyond all self-control, 
and dominated by one master-passion, sprang 
out of the body of the stove and fell at the feet 
of the speaker. 

“ Oh, let me stay ! Pray, meinherr, let me 
stay ! ” he sobbed. “ I have come all the way 
with Hirschvogel ! ” 

Some gentlemen’s hands seized him, not gently 
by any means, and their lips angrily muttered 
in his ear, “ Little knave, peace ! be quiet ! hold 
your tongue! It is the king ! ” 

They were about to drag him out of the 
august atmosphere as if he had been some veno- 
mous, dangerous beast come there to slay, but 
the voice he had heard speak of the stove said, 
in kind accents, “ Poor little child I he is very 
young. Let him go: let him speak to me.” 

The word of a king is law to his courtiers : so, 
sorely against their wish, the angry and aston- 
ished chamberlains let August slide out of their 
grasp, and he stood there in his little rough 
sheepskin coat and his thick, mud-covered boots, 
with his curling hair all in a tangle, in the midst 
of the most beautiful chamber he had ever 





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The Nurnberg Stove 


91 


dreamed of, and in the presence of a young 
man with a beautiful dark face, and eyes full of 
dreams and fire ; and the young man said to 
him : — 

“ My child, how came you here, hidden in this 
stove ? Be not afraid : tell me the truth. I am 
the king.” 

August, in an instinct of homage, cast his great 
battered black hat with the tarnished gold tassels 
down on the floor of the room, and folded his 
little brown hands in supplication. He was too 
intensely in earnest to be in any way abashed; 
he was too lifted out of himself by his love for 
Hirschvogel to be conscious of any awe before 
any earthly majesty. He was only so glad — so 
glad it was the king. Kings were always kind ; 
so the Tyrolese think, who love their lords. 

“Oh, dear king!” he said, with trembling en- 
treaty in his faint little voice, “ Hirschvogel was 
ours, and we have loved it all our lives; and 
father sold it. And when I saw that it did really 
go from us, then I said to myself I would go 
with it; and I have come all the way inside it. 
And last night it spoke and said beautiful things. 


92 


The Nurnberg Stove 


And I do pray you to let me live with it, and I 
will go out every morning and cut wood for it 
and you, if only you will let me stay beside it. 
No one ever has fed it with fuel but me since I 
grew big enough, and it loves me, — it does 
indeed ; it said so last night ; and it said that it 
had been happier with us than if it were in any 
palace — ” 

And then his breath failed him, and, as he 
lifted his little, eager, pale face to the young 
king’s, great tears were falling down his cheeks. 

Now, the king liked all poetic and uncommon 
things, and there was that in the child’s face 
which pleased and touched him. He motioned 
to his gentlemen to leave the little boy alone. 

“ What is your name.f^ ” he asked him. 

“ I am August Strehla. My father is Hans 
Strehla. We live in Hall, in the Innthal; and 
Hirschvogel has been ours so long — so long!” 

His lips quivered with a broken sob. 

“ And have you truly traveled inside this stove 
all the way from Tyrol ? ” 

“Yes,” said August; “no one thought to look 
inside till you did.” 


The Number g Stove 93 

The king laughed; then another view of the 
matter occurred to him. 

“ Who bought the stove of your father } ” he 
inquired. 

“ Traders of Munich,” said August, who did 
not know that he ought not to have spoken to 
the king as to a simple citizen, and whose little 
brain was whirling and spinning dizzily round 
its one central idea. 

“ What sum did they pay your father, do you 
know ? ” asked the sovereign. 

“ Two hundred florins,” said August, with a 
great sigh of shame. “ It was so much money, 
and he is so poor, and there are so many of us.” 

The king turned to his gentlemen-in-waiting. 
“ Did these dealers of Munich come with the 
stove ? ” 

He was answered in the affirmative. He de- 
sired them to be sought for and brought before 
him. As one of his chamberlains hastened on 
the errand, the monarch looked at August with 
compassion. 

“You are very pale, little fellow; when did 
you eat- last ? ” 


94 


The Nur^iberg Stove 


“ I had some bread and sausage with me ; yes- 
terday afternoon I finished it.” 

“ You would like to eat now } ” 

“ If I might have a little water I would be 
glad ; my throat is very dry.” 

The king had water and wine brought for him, 
and cake also ; but August, though he drank 
eagerly, could not swallow anything. His mind 
was in too great a tumult. 

“ May I stay with Hirschvogel ? — may I stay ? ” 
he said, with feverish agitation. 

“ Wait a little,” said the king, and asked 
abruptly, “ What do you wish to be when you 
are a man ? ” 

“ A painter. I wish to be what Hirschvogel 
was — I mean the master that made my Hirsch- 
vogel.” 

“ I understand,” said the king. 

Then the two dealers were brought into their 
sovereign’s presence. They were so terribly 
alarmed, not being either so innocent or so 
ignorant as August was, that they were trem- 
bling as though they were being led to the 
slaughter, and they were so utterly astonished 


The Nurnberg Stove 


95 


too at a child having come all the way from 
Tyrol in the stove, as a gentleman of the court 
had just told them this child had done, that they 
could not tell what to say or where to look, and 
presented a very foolish aspect indeed. 

“ Did you buy this Nurnberg stove of this 
boy’s father for two hundred florins the king 
asked them ; and his voice was no longer soft 
and kind as it had been when addressing the 
child, but very stern. 

“ Yes, your majesty,” murmured the trembling 
traders. 

“ And how much did the gentleman who pur- 
chased it for me give to you 1 ” 

“ Two thousand ducats, your majesty,” mut- 
tered the dealers, frightened out of their wits, 
and telling the truth in their fright. 

The gentleman was not present: he was a 
trusted counselor in art matters of the king’s, 
and often made purchases for him. 

The king smiled a little, and said nothing. 
The gentleman had made out the price to him as 
eleven thousand ducats. 

“ You will give at once to this boy’s father the 


96 


The Numb erg Stove 


two thousand gold ducats that you received, less 
the two hundred Austrian florins that you paid 
him,” said the king to his humiliated and abject 
subjects. “You are great rogues. Be thankful 
you are not more greatly punished.” 

He dismissed them by a sign to his courtiers, 
and to one of these gave the mission of making 
the dealers of the Marienplatz disgorge their ill- 
gotten gains. 

August heard, and felt dazzled yet miserable. 
Two thousand gold Bavarian ducats for his 
father ! Why, his father would never need to go 
any more to the salt-baking ! And yet whether 
for ducats or for florins, Hirschvogel was sold 
just the same, and would the king let him stay 
with it — would he 

“ Oh, do ! oh, please do ! ” he murmured, joining 
his little brown weather-stained hands, and kneel- 
ing down before the young monarch, who himself 
stood absorbed in painful thought, for the decep- 
tion so basely practised for the greedy sake of gain 
on him by a trusted counselor was bitter to him. 

He looked down on the child, and as he did 
so smiled once more. 


The Nurnberg Stove 


97 


“ Rise up, my little man,” he said, in a kind 
voice; “ kneel only to yourvGod. Will I let you 
stay with your Hirschvogel? Yes, I will; you 
shall stay at my court, and you shall be taught 
to be a painter, — in oils or on porcelain as you 
will, — and you must grow up worthily, and win 
all the laurels at our Schools of Art, and if when 
you are twenty-one years old you have done well 
and bravely, then I will give you your Nurnberg 
stove, or, if I am no more living, then those who 
reign after me shall do so. And now go away 
with this gentleman, and be not afraid, and you 
shall light a fire every morning in Hirschvogel, 
but you will not need to go out and cut the 
wood.” 

Then he smiled and stretched out his hand ; 
the courtiers tried to make August understand 
that he ought to bow and touch it with his lips, 
but August could not understand that anyhow ; 
he was too happy. He threw his two arms about 
the king’s knees, and kissed his feet passionately; 
then he lost all sense of where he was, and 
fainted away from hunger, and tire, and emotion, 
and wondrous joy. 


98 


The Nurnberg Stove 


As the darkness of his swoon closed in on 
him, he heard in his fancy the voice from Hirsch- 
vogel saying: — 

“ Let us be worthy our maker ! ” 

He is only a scholar yet, but he is a happy 
scholar, and promises to be a great man. Some- 
times he goes back for a few days to Hall, where 
the gold ducats have made his father prosperous. 
In the old house room there is a large white 
porcelain stove of Munich, the king’s gift to 
Dorothea and ’Gilda. 

And August never goes home without going 
into the great church and saying his thanks to 
God, who blessed his strange winter’s journey in 
the Nurnberg stove. As for his dream in the 
dealers’ room that night, he will never admit 
that, he did dream it ; he still declares that he 
saw it all, and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. 
And who shall say that he did not ? for what is 
the gift of the poet and the artist except to see 
the sights which others cannot see and to hear the 
sounds that others cannot hear ? 




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